In congratulating NASA's Langley Research Center and the Centre National
d'Etudes spatiales for CALIPSO's on-orbit milestone, Vice President and
General Manager for Ball's Civil and Operational Space business unit, Cary
Ludtke , said, "Exceeding one billion laser pulses is a significant milestone
and validates the early risk reduction investments made by NASA and Ball
Aerospace."

The Cloud-Aerosol LIdar with Orthogonal Polarization (CALIOP) instrument
aboard CALIPSO was developed by Ball Aerospace, its Virginia-based
subcontractor, Fibertek, and NASA Langley. CALIOP is a two-wavelength
polarization-sensitive lidar that provides high-resolution vertical profiles
of aerosols and clouds. The CALIPSO mission is providing new insight into the
role that clouds and atmospheric aerosol (airborne particles) play in
regulating Earth's weather, climate, and air quality.

CALIPSO's technical and scientific success leveraged many innovative
technologies including never-before-flown lasers, optical coatings and
filters, computers, digitizers, pointing mechanisms, low-noise power supplies
and microbolometer arrays. The flight risks associated with the laser were
then managed jointly by Ball, Fibertek, and NASA to methodically bring
spaceflight design, screening, environmental qualification, and contamination
management disciplines to the early development program. NASA's Langley
Research Center brought forth a solid history of lidar system design, low-
noise receiver design practices, and calibration methods from the shuttle-
based Lidar In-space Technology Experiment (LITE), and numerous aircraft-based
and ground-based lidar projects.